Padfield Brook – The Torside Goit
If Long Clough could, at times, be a raging torrent, Padfield Brook, less than two miles long, wouldn’t have been able to take the skin off the proverbial rice pudding. Yet it eventually provided the power for nine or ten mills, some of them quite big for their time. How was it done ?
The first two mills in that area were at Brookside, later Waterside, between the River Etherow and Padfield Brook, and took their power from the Etherow. In 1791 the owner, John Turner, decided to build a third, but to power it from the brook. He may well have discovered, as did many others, that powering mills from a river, especially one like the Etherow draining high rain-soaked hills, was a risky business – safer to dam a smaller tributary stream and build a millpond off the line of it, and the pond would fill up overnight with enough water to last through the day.
But there wasn’t enough in Padfield Brook. Turner’s late partner John Thornley had also built a mill higher up, and Turner agreed with his son and heir Robert “to join at equal expense in increasing the stream of water to their respective mills.” The result was Torside Goit, which brought a million gallons a day from Torside Clough, over three miles away up Longdendale. This gave the brook a flow comparable to Shelf Brook, which ran the mills in (Old) Glossop, but without the attendant flood risk, as in a cloudburst over Bleaklow any surplus water would just pour down Torside Clough into the Etherow.
Its construction was probably beyond what Turner and Thornley alone could afford, so would have needed a contribution from the landowner, the Duke of Norfolk, and the Duke’s workforce would have built it. It may even have been the Duke’s idea, or rather that of his agent, Charles Calvert. The Howard estate actively encouraged mill building by creating suitable sites, with water and good road access, the payoff for the Duke being a rent income, from the mills and the houses, which was far higher than he could get from farming. In 1791, Long Clough and the Shelf Brook were already being developed, and the building of the goit created another powerful stream which could support a string of mills.
The Duke’s involvement in the industry would also have helped minimise disputes about water, enabling competing mills to share a common supply without endless lawsuits. If there were no legal rights to water, or nobody to enforce them, and your mill was the highest on the stream, in dry weather you could just divert all the water into your own pond at night, and your competitors downstream would have to wait till you’d finished with it. When mills burned down, as they often did, it was not always a disaster for the businesses, as their water rights, plus their weirs, races and ponds, were their biggest assets – without guaranteed water the building itself had little value.
Although there were by then two others using the brook – Turner, and Samuel Lees at Padfield Brook Mill – in 1795 the Duke leased the goit to Robert Thornley, which suggests that he was the largest user, or at least intended to be. Although he would be able to recoup some of his costs from the others, he presumably wouldn’t have taken on the responsibility of maintaining the goit unless he saw it as a vital long-term asset to his business. In the event, things didn’t work out quite as he may have planned. In the next post we will look at the Thornleys, the mills they built on the brook, and what happened to them.
The Thornleys and their mills are long gone, but nearly 230 years later the goit is still there, although it now feeds the reservoirs alongside Padfield Main Road. You can see it very clearly as you drive towards Glossop on the B6105 – as you approach the Devil’s Elbow, it runs above the road on the left, then goes under it at the bend and runs below it on the other side, see pic. And Padfield Brook is once again, most of the time, no more than a gentle trickle.
NEXT – Part 4b: Padfield Brook – The Thornley Mills
PREVIOUS – Part 3c: Long Clough – Lower Turn Lee and Primrose Mills